1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to a mineral sorting apparatus and a method of operating the apparatus, and more particularly to a simplified valuable mineral sorting apparatus and a method of sorting minerals using the apparatus, which is configured to sort and collect various valuable minerals contained in clastic resources such as river sand or sea sand sediments.
2. Description of the Related Art
Valuable minerals such as ilmenite, rutile, zircon, sillimanite and monazite are used as essential elements in many kinds of industries. More specifically, ilmenite is used in production of welding rods, special magnetic materials or ultraviolet screening materials, and zircon is used in production of ceramics, high-class bearings or ball mills. Particularly, monazite usually contains a large of amount of rare elements such as lanthanum, cerium and samarium which are referred to as “vitamins of industry”.
However, our country is importing the entirety of the above-mentioned minerals, and worldwide, the costs of raw mineral ores are currently rapidly on the rise, thereby causing the costs of the minerals to rise considerably. For example, rutile and sillimanite are approaching 200 dollars/ton, and zircon is approaching 900 dollars/ton. What is more, because countries possessing resources are weaponizing the resources in recent days, the countries possessing resources are seeking preventive measures against the outflow of their resources by strengthening their export regulation policies, such as raising export duties and restricting foreign-capital-funded resource development.
In contrast, because our country has almost no rare minerals present in ground reserves which are widely utilized in high-value-added industries, almost the total amount of the various necessary core materials and parts are imported from abroad. Thus our country may be seriously affected by the weaponization of resources and exclusive price increases of advanced countries and those countries possessing such resources. Accordingly, development of technologies for the extraction of domestic minerals is required, and thus there may be a rising interest in clastic resources such as sea sand and river sand.
The results of domestic exploration showed that sea sand or river sand contains valuable minerals such as ilmenite, monazite and zircon. For example, it was known that valuable minerals account for 1.5% of sea sand. Furthermore, data of the Construction Ministry from in 2007 showed that sea sand of 23 million tons is exploited and used as construction materials. There are about 500,000 tons of valuable minerals in 23,000,000 tons sea sand, and the economic value of these valuable minerals is approximately 1,000,000,000 dollars.
Accordingly, there is a need for a technology of preventing clastic resources such as sea sand and river sand from being mixed with construction aggregates and from being discarded, and of collecting valuable minerals such as rare minerals from clastic resources.
First of all, there is required for a technology which considers the facts that unlike mined mineral ores, clastic resources such as sand contains singulated minerals and that unlike a mineral ore containing a single kind of mineral, sand contains various kinds of valuable minerals.
The following documents may be relevant to the invention and are hereby fully incorporated by reference:
Korean Patent Registration No. 10-1241789
Korean Patent Registration No. 10-1241790
Japanese Patent document JP 06142546
Japanese Patent document JP 06114294
Japanese Patent document JP 07155510.